Greyer yet and greyer

Today’s guest picture shows that the greyness was nationwide. My sister Mary had this view over London when she went for her walk today.

The weather surpassed itself here today by producing the greyest day yet. It was a little warmer though, and not very windy at all so it could have been worse. All the same, we had a very quiet morning. Margaret came for coffee, and we made broth for lunch and somehow managed to fill in the rest of the time without disturbing anything or anyone. I did shift myself to enter more of the newspaper index into the Archive Group database so the unwelcome weather is doing some good.

I was talking to my brother-in-law on the phone when a sparrowhawk flew into the garden, gave me a hard stare through the window, and flew off again. The new position for the feeder gives the little birds more of a chance to see the hawk coming, and they escaped unscathed.

After lunch, I put on my walking socks, my waterproof trousers and my boots, picked up an umbrella and went for a gloomy walk.

It was gloomy as I went along the track towards Skippers Bridge in the rain.

A horse was taking what shelter it could find under an old oak tree.

I crossed the bridge . . .

. . . and took the road down the river on the other side.

A bit of brightness was brought to the walk by generous amounts of lichen on fallen branches.

When they road turned to go up the hill to Broomholm, I took the path up Jenny Noble’s Gill. The day hadn’t got any less gloomy . . .

. . . but some storm damaged branches had made a neat archway over the path beside the field.

Once I got into the woods, the paths got rather muddy and I had keep my eyes on where I was going rather than look about for items of interest. As a result, all I took were some more gloomy pictures . . .

. . . though the misty background let this oak stand out more than it would usually.

Nature had added some sparkling baubles to the trees . . .

. . . and there was subdued colour in the leaves on a beech sapling . . .

. . . along with some artificial cheeriness when I got back to human habitation.

Once my feet were on more solid ground, I could look about. I saw fungus on old tree trunk . . .

. . . and an elegant door in a wall. . .

. . . which came as a surprise to me. Either it is new or I haven’t being paying enough attention lately.

It didn’t rain hard, but it did rain all the time that I was out, so I was quite pleased to get home. On my way in, I noticed that the birds have not eaten all of our cotoneaster berries yet.

While I had been out, Mrs Tootlepedal had been busy . . .

. . . but she assures me that more fairy lights are required.

I settled down and entered some more of our stock of recorder music onto my spreadsheet. I have done 17 boxes and have only 2 left to go. I have revised the entries so that the sheet can be sorted by composer, instrumentation, and box number. All that is left now is to find another player for the group so that we can play the quintets as well as the quartets.

I was looking idly at my WP statistics yesterday, and found that I have already inflicted 300,722 words on patient readers this year. This has come as a bit of a shock, so I will stop this post here.

It was far too dim for a flying bird today.